Michael Flynn’s 2017 guilty plea was one of the biggest flashpoints of the Russia probe, seeming at the time to underscore the extent to which Robert Mueller's inquiry posed a threat to Donald Trump personally. Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had been brought down a little more than a month earlier, but mainly for shady work he did before joining Team Trump. Flynn’s indictment for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia, on the other hand, struck at the heart of what Mueller had been tasked with investigating—suggesting that the links between the Trump campaign and Moscow’s 2016 election interference were not, as the president would have you believe, part of a deep-state “hoax.”

Dominoes would continue to fall —Michael Cohen, Roger Stone—but the probe would ultimately end with a whimper: Attorney General William Barrdismissed the wrongdoing Mueller outlined in his 2019 report, the special counsel’s Capitol Hill testimony didn’t produce the fireworks Democrats had hoped would touch off impeachment proceedings, and Trump moved on to trying to strong-arm Ukraine for dirt on the Bidens.

All things considered, the president should’ve been happy about the way the Mueller inquiry turned out—the underlings he was willing to throw under the bus anyway bore the brunt of it, and he skated free, despite evidence that he obstructed justice. But Trump has never quite moved on, bellyaching about the “witch hunt” from time to time on Twitter; comparing other perceived slights to it; and commissioning Barr to investigate the investigators.

That review on Wednesday turned up what Flynn and Trump see as evidence of the short-lived national security adviser’s vindication: redacted email exchanges and notes from federal agents that the retired general’s lawyers say shows he was set up. “What is our goal?” an official wrote in the notes, seemingly written in preparation for the interview in which Flynn misrepresented his contacts with the then-Russian ambassador. “Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Flynn’s legal team say the documents, unsealed by a judge Wednesday, prove he was set up and that the case should be thrown out, the Wall Street Journalreported Thursday. The president himself endorsed that assessment in a flurry of tweets overnight and into Thursday morning, suggesting a pardon may be imminent for the former national security adviser. “What happened to General Michael Flynn, a war hero, should never be allowed to happen to a citizen of the United States again!” Trump wrote Thursday, after suggesting that members of the media should “pay a big price” for reporting on Flynn’s case.

For Trump and his allies, the documents are confirmation of all his “deep state” conspiracy theories about the Russia probe—even roping in two of the president’s favorite punching bags, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. “The FBI pre-planned a deliberate attack on Gen. Flynn,” attorney Sidney Powell told the Wall Street Journal. “The FBI planned it as a perjury trap.” But the revelations are hardly as vindicating as Trump and Flynn are framing them. As the Brookings Institute’s Benjamin Wittes pointed out Wednesday, Flynn’s guilty plea in 2017 to the false statements charge helped him—and his son—avoid prosecution on more serious charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent, all while working for a presidential transition. Meanwhile, he lied about his Russia contacts not only to the FBI, but to Vice President Mike Pence—something Trump himself acknowledged just after Flynn’s indictment.

Based on what’s been released so far, the FBI’s handling of Flynn has not seemed out of the ordinary, according to Wittes. “To everyone in Trumpland who thinks that Flynndication is on the horizon,” Wittes wrote, “hold the champagne—and maybe put away whatever you’re smoking.”

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The emails and notes may or may not get Flynn’s conviction tossed, but they would seem to raise the likelihood of the pardon Trump said he was considering last month. In fact, Trump may have even bigger plans for his old pal. Asked by Trump-friendly One America News Network in a press conference Monday if he would consider rehiring Flynn, the president didn’t exactly shut the door on the idea. “I think that General Flynn is a wonderful man,” Trump said. “He had a wonderful career. And it was a disgrace what happened to General Flynn. Let’s see what happens now. But what happened to General Flynn should never happen again in our country. What happened to other people should never happen again in our country. What happened to your president of the United States should never again be allowed to happen.”